NOTES FROM ARDEN

BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS

Big City, Small Town

BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS

Has NoHo turned into the West Village?

North Hollwood Red Line Station

True story: Last Sunday afternoon, as we’re coming from a coffee with Theatre Unleashed producer Gregory Crafts at Republic of Pie, we duck into Eclectic Café on Lankershim aiming to get some pre-dinner-rush-hour writing time on our computer before heading downtown on the Red Line.  There at a table sit Stage and Cinema editor Tony Frankel, his partner, and actress Rhonda Aldrich, whom they’d just seen in Antaeus Company’s production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls. Frankel lauds its quality, and our laptop remains in its case. We hobnob for an hour.

After going our separate ways, Stage Raw heads down the North Hollywood subway station staircase when, coming up the other side with bike hoisted over his shoulder, we see the perspiring Lovell Estell III, on his way to Brett Neveu’s Detective Partner Hero Villain at NoHo Actors’ Studio.

At the bottom of the stairwell, the Red Line train sits ready to depart in three minutes. We race onto the nearest car, where Variety’s L.A. theater critic Bob Verini is sitting, reading, taking the train to The Tallest Tree in the Forest at the Taper. We get to talking – about what you may ask?

Well, as result of whatever it was, Verini’s first review for Stage Raw – Porgy and Bess at the Ahmanson — will appear next week.

That seems like a lot of theater people to crash into, randomly, on a Sunday afternoon in NoHo. They say cars isolate people. Take away the cars, and you get what starts to look like a village – not to mention, need it be said?  – a theater town.

Lions and Tigers and Politics on Stage! (And in a Gallery)

Antaeus Company’s Top Girls (Photo by Daniel G. Lam)

Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls takes feminist politics, spins it through a wash-cycle of about nine centuries via a historical fantasia including the mythical eleventh century Pope Joan (an allegedly female Pope who walked around in men’s attire), painter Pieter Breughel’s Dull Grette,  Chaucer’s Patient Griselda and an array of 20^th century women, including the protagonist Marlene, who’s throwing a bash at which all the historical figures appear, in order to celebrate her promotion at the employment agency where she works. The play goes on to examine Marlene’s vaulting ambition, and the costs to her humanity of entering the male cosmos.

It’s now 32 years since Top Girls first appeared at London’s Royal Court Theatre. Who’d have thought that Marlene would be racing towards a new century with continuing income inequality between the genders, not to mention an even more nagging bias towards male playwrights in the presentation of their works in professional theaters, and towards male visual artists, in the presentation of their works in the world’s top galleries.

Pauline Adamek’s feature this week looks at an exhibition of posters (just extended to May 9) at ForYourArt gallery on Wilshire Boulevard in the Fairfax District. (en)Gender (in) Equity is directed at the chilling statistics on gender inequity at top galleries in L.A. and New York.

Also, we profile Charles Duncombe, Producing Director at City Garage, whose play Bulgakov–Molière is the latest example of Duncombe’s stubborn determination to make topical politics part of the discussion in American theater – sort of like they do in Germany and Brazil and London – almost everywhere else, actually — where the political discourse in plays like Top Girls is regarded as something to fuel the theater rather than to fowl it.

Charles Duncombe

Bill Raden is off this week; his Stage Rows returns next week, with his report from NYC on Angelenos in NYC.

There’s a poet/drama critic named Clem (he wouldn’t give us his last name – says he’s on an FBI watch list for a reason he wouldn’t discuss), who may turn in his review of Antaeus Company’s Top Girls over the weekend. He may compare it to Bulgakov-Molière but he may not. Whatever he pukes up, we’ll post it as soon as it comes in, along with a couple of his poems.